Thinking.

Thinking is not a bad thing.

Yes. I said it. Thinking is not a bad thing.

This thought has been coming to my mind often these past few days as I have again been wrestling with the implications of social media, our addiction to it, and our tendency to simply accept a complacency not only when it comes to our daily routines but also with the answers of faith and life that we guzzle without truly thinking them through.

These two ideas may not seem to be correlated, at least, not on the surface. Recently I have been hopping back onto the social media sites that I had practically given up this past summer, and the one thing I truly began to notice was how quickly my time was being wasted staring at a screen that only offers an augmented reality. Sure, your facebooks and your instagrams may show you glimpses of the real world, but it is only a representation of what has been as heavily edited as a teenage girl's "Selfie Sunday" post. Yet we go on, staring at screens, having silent conversations with the people that are sitting somewhere else silently staring at a screen when they could be engaging and interacting with those around them and, more importantly, with the God that is speaking to us from the words of His book and the jaw-dropping complexity of His creation.

But to engage in the creation that God has placed us in we must do something. We must willingly detach ourselves from our televisions, our cell phones, our iPods and our social media empires so that we can look around and be reminded that life is more than the number of followers you have on Twitter.

I believe that this is scary to many of us, because the quieter it gets and the more still our anxious thumbs become, the more the questions begin to pour into our minds. What is unnerving is that, to many, blocking out these questions is why they plunge themselves into the mental paralysis in the first place. Maybe its because these questions involve a sort of abandonment of the pre-wrapped answers that I mentioned earlier. Maybe its because these questions involve us finally picking a side to stand on instead of doing our strange universalist dance in between mushy opinions that we perform so often. Maybe it's because we are complacent, or maybe it's because we don't think that our current beliefs about God and humanity can stand up to the questions that lurk in our minds.

My challenge is that you take the time to think things through. I know that I sure have been. Question things, its okay to stop posting tweets and selfies and links to funny gifs of cats in order to think. Its okay to stop and ask why you believe something. And I can assure you, God is big enough to handle the questions.

For Jesus. Everything for Jesus.

Onwards.